I was talking to a psychologist earlier this week about Halloween, and she noted that these days, real people were scarier than Dracula or Frankenstein could ever be.
She was right, of course. I think many parents of young children, perhaps especially Jewish parents, are having a hard time this year celebrating a holiday dedicated to being scared of monsters when there are so many real monsters on the loose in the world.
We are living in an age of anxiety, to put it mildly. But then I remembered that we always have been, to an extent. The custom of “trick or treating” didn’t really become established until the 1930s. That was during the Great Depression, and you have to wonder who then could afford to give out candy, or much of anything else.
I wasn’t around then, nor during World War II, when the monsters were also real, and daddy might have been off many miles away trying to kill them. But I was a child during the Cold War. Halloween when I was ten came just days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came as close as we ever did to being incinerated in a nuclear war.
But none of that seemed to touch Halloween.
I never saw, nor heard of, a kid back then who dressed up as an H-bomb or Nikita Khrushchev for Halloween. I think there was an unspoken rule that Halloween belonged to the pretend monsters and that we had enough of the real ones the rest of the year.
But I think there was something else going on, too: I think we believed in ourselves and our fellow Americans in a way we don’t anymore. Yes, we had divisions back then, and a few of us were killing each other in a fight over civil rights.
But no matter what side we were on then, we were confident that somehow America would win through in the end. We had done so, after all, just a few years before. Vietnam was a tiny cloud far off on the horizon. Nobody had ever heard the term Watergate.
Nobody worried that someone would shoot up our elementary school. We are living in a different world now, one that is technologically far superior.
There are lots of other good things going on too. Detroit is now getting better, not worse. When it was getting dark last night, I drove over to see some real heroes when the sun was going down; the men and women of Detroit Blight Busters, getting ready to start their patrols and having a fast dinner at their fabulous Artists’ Café next to the old Redford Theater.
For years, they have saved lives, millions in property, and their city’s honor by cutting down arson with their “Angels’ Night” patrols. Mayor Mike Duggan had told them their services were no longer required, that the city no longer had to worry about a new flair-up of the orgy of arson fires that back in the 1980s made Devils’ Night synonymous with Detroit.
Duggan may have been right. But I am glad John George and his troops didn’t listen. Showing your love by patrolling your neighborhood once a year to keep it safe is an act of the profoundest patriotism. It sends a message that the good guys are here to stay.
So let’s start believing it, and banishing the monsters. Or as Detroit’s motto says speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. That’s already happening.
Even when the monsters appear, try not to forget.
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